Wintersong Read online

  Wintersong

  Part One of the Wintersong Chronicle

  By William Cooper

  Copyright 2012 William Cooper

  Smashwords Edition

  Table of Contents

  Free Jon

  The King’s General

  The Mercenary

  The Raven Twins

  The Viscount’s Son

  Bad Tidings

  On the Run

  Arrivals and Ill news

  The Night of Discord

  The Jack-o-Stripes

  The King’s Footpad

  The Queen and the Ambassador

  The Lady of the Night

  The King

  The Lords at the Gate

  Cawyck Castle

  The Captain of the Ironsides

  The Footpad’s Hunt

  Collision

  The Battle of Wintercross

  Aran’s Battle

  Karac Lor.

  Dedication

  For Katrina, for all her support.

  And for the Moog.

  Free Jon

  The watchmen hurled him into the cell with brutal efficiency. Hitting the filthy reed strewn floor with a heavy thud, the air exploded from his lungs. Pain lanced through his forehead as it smashed into the ancient flagstones. Half stunned, and in agony, he rolled onto his back gasping heavily as he fought for air. Even in his pain he still had some fight left and instinctively kicked a leg out at one of the gaolers. His muddy boot caught a gaoler on his ankle, forcing the guard to leap back with a curse.

  ‘You heathen whoresons!’ shouted the prisoner, ‘Have you no respect for a common man on winterso...’

  The guard he had struck silenced him with a savage kick to his groin. Crying out, Jon rolled into a defensive ball and vomited. Locked in his world of pain, he never heard the guards leave the freezing cell. His mind was foggy from the cudgel blows the watchman had dealt him on the street. Try as he would, he could think not clearly, and all he could conjure in his mind was grey half-remembered shadows. Eventually the pain receded enough for him to move slowly, and, with care, he crawled over to a cell wall. Reaching his destination, he sat painfully with his back to the damp surface. He looked around his new lodgings. The cell was rancid and the air thick with the scent of human waste. The floor was bare with nowhere to sit, or lay, in comfort, other than amongst the infested reeds. At least he had some light, even if was the pale and insipid moonlight that filtered in through the small barred window on the wall opposite the heavy cell door. The barred gap in the wall opened up at ground level to the courtyard the locals called the Butchers Yard. It was a large courtyard inside the King’s Tower, a plain square of unremarkable cobbles grown heavy with history and slaughter. A nice touch, he mused. The prisoner in this cell would hear the begging screams of those about to be executed and the roar of the approving crowd when the axeman plied his trade.

  He hated the King’s Tower, even from a distance it sat low and squat on the Royal Hill, like some foul creature ready to pounce down on the city spread out below. The very walls seemed saturated with the pain of centuries and the dark injustices that had been contained within it. Its ugly black stone walls and towers had been constructed to subjugate a hostile people nearly a thousand years before. The Tower was rumoured to be built on an ancient pagan site where blood sacrifices had been performed; a place ill favoured by history. The pagan stone circle was replaced by a fortress when the Calnus Empire turned its eyes towards this island nation. When even the Calnus succumbed to history, their fortress was replaced by the King’s Tower. It was built by a new breed of kings who aped the emperors of old. These new lords would have their castles, and they understood a castle was more than just a place of defence, but a symbol of power that reminded all who could see it who held the power in the land.

  That was the way of the nobility, and of kings. The priests of the Free Church called it the three estates of God. A divinely ordained society neatly cut into immovable estates that mapped out a man’s destiny in accordance with his birth. They were the estates of the plough, the sword and the staff. ‘The plough for the commoner, the sword for the knight and the staff for the priest,’ as the old saying went. The lords claimed to protect the commoners, while reminding them who held the sword. The godly priests were no better. All of them pious thieves in silk robes and stone churches; fat men who preached the beauty of poverty to the starving peasant living in his hovel. The priest’s staff was a weapon of sorts. It seemed to Jon that the sword and the staff represented the twin weapons of religious guilt and fear. The peasant had only the plough to content themselves with, a harsh symbol of their labour. God, how could people be so blind?

  Sighing to himself, he cursed himself for a fool to end up in the Tower on the night of the Wintersong celebrations. A soft laugh passed from his broken lips. Why not? His garret down in the Stews was only marginally better than this filthy place. At least the rats here didn't try to charge him rent, he thought. He could see old Smiley’s scarred face, sneering at Jon as he saw through his excuses for not having his money. Smiley was typical of the slum of Thornsreach. Degraded scum all, brutal and criminal. Jon knew that Smiley would not wait for him to be released, and what little he had left would be thrown onto the streets, for thieves and beggars’ to pick through. He bet even that old bastard had somewhere warn to spend the night, and in company of some sort. Though god knows what kind of people old Smiley would call friends.

  It was his own fault, he knew. Once he had no worries about money. In those warmer days he was a simple pamphleteer, or a jack-o-stripes as some called it. Such a career had its risks as the powerful would not stand to be mocked. Yet he could do nothing else now; despite losing his access to money and comfort. His cause was just, and the fire in his heart could not be extinguished by such minor things, he told himself. He had done the best to continue Wallencourt’s message, to deny the presumed power of the kings. Sadly he had neither the contacts nor the money that Wallencourt had possessed to make much of it. He barely eked out a living, working in an alehouse and the warehouses on the docks. Yet, one day they would hear his message. He frequently told himself to be strong as his was an important message, the chains of servitude had to be broken!

  For weeks now he had been haunting the markets and the courtyards of Thornsreach; handing out his pamphlets out to those who would read them. Coming to the city had been wise. In the countryside too many could not read, but in Thornsreach there were many who could; or at least who would know someone that did. He had been careful to keep a low profile, but he had gotten too complacent and had pushed it too far today. The Street of Canters had been a bad idea, and he had been caught by the watch. Wintersong was the only time you didn’t find the small podiums lining that busy street full of preachers and prophets. This time of year it was full of traders and merchants and he had decided to take his chances on one of the empty podiums. He had paid for a fistful of wood cut pamphlets and handed them out freely while canting his own slogans. The latest pamphlet he had written was titled, ‘On Kings and the Falsehood of the Divine Right!’

  God! How the Free Church, the Concord and the whole damned lot of them hated those pamphlets. Ever since the means to print via woodblocks and ink had come from the continent thirty years ago, the Concord and the Church had tried to ban the printing press; or close printers down, with indifferent success. Wallencourt called it the ‘inevitability of progress.’ It meant the common man could now get access to books and ideas that only the rich would have got their hands on. Though sometimes Jon doubted the commoner was always interested in his words as much as he would have liked. The common man seemed to prefer the more lurid tales of bards and bawdy singers. Still he had his moral duty, and so he read out the part that recanted t
he so called divine right of kings to rule. As if god cared what man sat on the throne! The watch had not cared to hear the truth either, and he was soon pulled off the podium, arrested, roughed up, stripped of his money and thrown into this cell.

  Spitting more blood out of his mouth he tried to relax and sought solace in happier memories. Last Wintersong had been good. He had been visiting Middlegrove, the home of his friend, Wallencourt. But that old raconteur and radical was dead now. He had been hung for treason by the king’s justice, in the very courtyard above him. Poor old Wallencourt he thought. He would have come up with some ruse to escape the watch, outwitted or out talked them perhaps, but a small voice in his head said, ‘He wasn’t smart enough to avoid the king’s hangman.’ Wallencourt had sung a pretty song to the torturers before they hanged him, and seven others joined him that day. Good, loyal men, given up under torture by the fat man, but how could he blame him? He doubted he would be able to spit in the face of the king’s torturer and he had been used to hardship in his life. His old friend had never named him as a conspirator, and he took some comfort from that. Though his friend Dex had been blunter and said it was because he wasn’t important to Wallencourt, and despite what he thought he was just a useful tool and a mirror to the man’s vanity. Dex claimed that Wallencourt was a man used to manipulating people and getting his way. But he couldn’t believe that. Wallencourt had been so kind and generous to him. He had spent so many Wintersongs in the man’s home, with all the others. In the luxury of that house they had argued politics and philosophy over ale and good food.

  Wallencourt frequently gave forth on the perils of royalty, and praised the merits of a free government of senators of the ancient republics. Acorin was the greatest and wisest of them, but that ancient republic was gone now, consumed by civil war and the expanding Calnus Empire. It was powerful and just and had ruled much of the southern continent over two thousand years ago. It was wise men and philosophers who made the laws in that land, not kings. They crafted a constitution written by a free senate, but Dex had angered them all by pointing out that Acorin philosophers could sit and think all day as they had slaves to do the work for them, and the constitution defined free men as those who were rich and powerful. Wallencourt had been right about Dex, he was dangerous and disruptive, but Jon still admired the man’s quick wit and sharp tongue. Yet even Dex was gone now. Though he had heard Dex had escaped capture, and had vanished as soon as they had arrested Wallencourt. God only knows where Dex was this Wintersong.

  For a long time Jon sat in the darkness quietly humming a Wintersong tune to himself. As always his mind turned to his old home in Ridgemoor, above Harding’s down, in the north of the Isle. The face of his dead wife was conjured unwillingly to his mind. They had lived in a small cottage; he had had a small amount of land and was a freeholder. It was nothing grand, but it was his and was enough to live off comfortably, if not well. He had met his wife in the summer fayre, and he had fallen clumsily in love with her. They were both giddy with joy when they married before the local Free Faith priest in Ryder’s orchard. A boon granted by the good Viscount, who also supplied the hog for the wedding feast and two barrels of nut brown ale. Ryder was a good man, for a lord. He had to give him that. He exchanged his vows with his new wife, and the families and the villagers cheered as the kissed wearing the ivy crowns. He had been so full of joy the first night they spent together in the cottage, and he loved his fair Merith with a deep passion. His brown eyed lady, as he called her. A year later he wept for joy when Merith was with child. Then the night of the birth came. He remembered hearing his wife screaming from his place outside the cottage. The cries of pain and fear went on for hours, and he banged his fist on the door begging to be let in. Though neither priest nor midwife would allow it. Then there was a terrifying silence that seemed to go on for an age, only to be broken by the cry of a baby calling for its dead mother.

  For two days he refused to enter the cottage, refusing to hold his own son that had killed his beloved, and he wept at the injustice of it all. In the end, the priest had come to consul him, but he had sent him away with a blow and a curse at his capricious god. That was the day he walked away from his freeholding, leaving his son in the care of his sister, and Jon never looked back.

  He wandered for months, not caring which direction he took. He passed through towns and villages in a fugue. Working odd jobs where he could, he spent many a night sleeping in a hedgerow with an empty belly. Vague memories of that time would surface occasionally, a job working clearing a ditch on a lord’s manor, a night spent in a pauper’s hovel, or a fight in some rank alehouse that he lost badly. Once he seemed to be working on some riverboat carrying goods to Rendalhome. Looking back at that time it felt as if he had died and was travelling through some dull, grey underworld. Condemned to wander in limbo for the crime of abandoning his son. At night, the guilt would often come out of the shadows of broken sleep, and he would hear his son crying and see the scornful face of his dead wife. He knew he should return to Ridgemoor, but the shame of striking the old priest and the clucking tongues of the villagers would be harder to bear than the guilt of abandoning a child, and god how he hated himself for that cowardice. He would not, could not, return. He knew he wasn’t travelling but running, yet no matter how fast he run the truth was painfully simple, he could not outrun himself.

  Then one autumnal morning he met his salvation. He had found an ale house on the Great Northern Road. And there he saw the fat Wallencourt standing on a table and holding court to the bemused crowd of travellers and farmers. Wallencourt’s deep booming voice talked of the rights of man and of the tyranny of church and state. The crowd mocked and jeered him, for they were men content with the world and saw no reason to change it. Jon found the man’s words as sweet as nectar, and his hunger for more grew. Eventually the fat man was asked to leave by the tavern owner, no doubt fearing that the mockery of the crowd may turn ugly. John followed the jack-o-stripes outside, and hailed him as the fat man waddled to his coach. The man turned quickly his hand on the hilt of his dagger, his face fearful. John asked him to tell him more. The man relaxed, smiling at him and beckoned him towards his private coach. That was the day he joined the Gentleman of Reason and everything changed.

  They were a small and dedicated group of men spread, across the Golden Isle. Financed by Wallencourt, the group sought to proselytise the truth of the arrogance of kings. Most were commoners; some were lords, though mostly of the minor sort. Others, like the fiery Dex, were of the middling sort; sons of merchants, priests and the like. They all shared one thing, a thirst for intellectual conversation, which gave birth to many a good night were they talked and debated. They planned their next series of pamphlets and how they would get them to the commoners. The simple farmer that had run like a coward from pain and grief was lost in the higher glory of pursuing the truth. He had been reborn, re modelled by the truth and now he called himself Free Jon. His purpose was greater than anything he had done in his previous life, and he quickly changed in that time. Jon had lived well and travelled the Isle, where he practised his skills as a speaker and found he had a knack for the written word.

  Wallencourt often spoke of the ‘Change of Days,’ when the world would be turned upside down and they all prayed for that day, when kings would till the fields with the common man. Wallencourt was impatient for the day. For years they pricked the conscious of kings but were careful not to draw too much attention to themselves. For the King was weak, with his foreign High Church whore of a wife, but his spymaster was not. Yet, despite their caution, one day Wallencourt pushed it too far. He had sent a letter of remonstration to the King, signed by several of the minor lords who worshipped the Wallencourt’s every word. The letter demanded that the King put aside his foreign wife, with her unpopular and mistrusted religion, and call the children he had beget on her bastards. Wallencourt threatened revolt and blood on the streets if the King did not listen and take note of the letter. Dex had laughed at the lette
r, wondering whom Wallencourt expected to raise up alongside a fat man and some impoverished lords. The letter never reached the King, but some say it reached the Kings Footpad; the whispered name the commoners used when speaking of the King’s spymaster. If that was true then the devil acted quickly, for the Footpad called an end to the troublesome at Wallencourt. The Spymaster’s thugs arrived at night like thieves, dragging Wallencourt out of his Thornsreach mansion and bundled him into a black coach. Others were also rounded up that night. The speed and efficiency of the spymasters actions had made Jon wonder if there had been a spy in their midst. He had been lucky as no one came for him that night, even so he moved the next day as a precaution.

  The remaining Gentleman were scattered, some were caught begged pathetically for their lives. They were hung alongside Wallencourt for treason and insulting the King’s wife. Others fled to the continent to who knows what fate. He had decided to stay and hide in the city. In truth, he soon realised the Footpad’s men were not looking closely for him, and on the day of Wallencourt’s execution he easily slipped into the Butcher’s Yard with the rest of the crowd to watch his friends fate. He felt he owed the man that much at least.

  Once inside, he looked around at those who surrounded him. He was horrified as the commoners Wallencourt had wanted to set free chanted and laughed at Wallencourt and his ‘conspirators’. It would seem Dex was right. The poor of the city of Thornsreach would not rise up as Jon had secretly hoped. It was sickening to watch them laugh at the men’s battered faces. Wallencourt was weeping like a child, and the other conspirators stared unblinkingly at the crowd, with wide frightened eyes, as if not believing what was happening to him. Traitors were always hung, and their embalmed heads placed on a spike atop Traitor’s Gate in the east of the city. It was only when the noose was put around Wallencourt’s neck that his weeping stopped to be replaced with the screams and the kicks of a craven. This set the other condemned men off who also started to scream in terror; and, to the delight of the crowd, had to be beaten with oak sticks across their backs until silenced. Then the charges were read out, and finally, the lever was pulled by the hangman and Jon’s friends dropped. Mercifully, it was over quickly.